The foredoomed smack was almost like a buoy in a tideway; the sea came over her, screaming as it met her resistance, like the back-draught among pebbles.

Ferrier found to his dismay that, even if he wanted to render any assistance, he was too much of a landsman to keep his feet in that inexorable cataract, and he saw, too, that the vessel was gradually rolling more and more to starboard.

The pumps were mastered, and even on deck the ugly squelch, squelch of the mass of water below could be heard.

Every swing of that liquid pendulum smote on our young man's heart, and he learned, in a few short hours, the meaning of Death.
Can a seaman be other than superstitious or religious?
The hamper of ropes that clung round the mainmast seemed to gibber like a man in fever as the gale threaded the mazes; the hollow down-draught from the foresail cried in boding tones; it seemed like some malignant elf calling "Woe to you! Woe for ever! Darkness is coming, and I and Death await you with cold arms." Every timber complained with whining iteration, and the boom of the full, falling seas tolled as a bell tolls that beats out the last minutes of a mortal's life.

The Cockney poet sings-- "A cheer for the hard, glad weather, The quiver and beat of the sea!" Shade of Rodney! What does the man know about it?
If his joints were aching and helpless with the "hardness," he would not think the weather so "glad"; if the "beat of the sea" made every nerve of him quiver with the agony of salt-water cracks, I reckon he would want to go home to his bath and bed; and if the savage combers gnashed at him like white teeth of ravenous beasts, I take it that his general feelings of jollity would be modified; while last of all, if he saw the dark portal--goal of all mortals--slowly lifting to let him fare on to the halls of doom, I wager that poet would not think of rhymes.